do not go gentle into that good night
by kingslayers
Summary: And sometimes James wishes desperately that he was better—not to be the best or anything, but just to be good enough to save them for once. / James Potter takes on war and learns that even when you win, you lose. —james-centric, for the level-up competition.


**written for:** the level-up competition; tutorial, stage one, task two: a 3k oneshot about your overall favourite character (james potter).

 **prompts:** hot-headed / argument; dramatic / death; odd / pairing featured with less than 300 fics (james/lily definitely has more, but there is also dorcas/fabian, gideon/mundungus and caradoc/emmeline, though the latter is less prevalent than the middle two); the first scene is also at hogwarts, but seeing as the rest isn't, i would assume this doesn't classify as student (hogwarts setting), so that will definitely feature in my next task.

 **notes:** exactly 3000 words! i ended up twelve words over so i had to do a bit of refining, but i got it down to the wordcount which is exciting.

 **thanks:** to roma ( semiotics), bc she had to deal with me yelling about original fiction to her last night (well like four am, actually, but oh well) as well as me sending her random parts of this fic for her to yell at me about lol

 **warnings:** swearing—weirdly enough for me, _not_ marlene this time. dorcas is probably the biggest warning. also, death, heads up.

 **disclaimer:** disclaimed.

* * *

"Do you ever think about how you're going to die?"

James starts, tilting his head to look at Marlene. They're lying on the roof—the Marauders, Emmeline and Marlene—of the Quidditch shed, sixteen years old and convinced they're the kings and queens of the world. The question seems to come out of nowhere, but then again, with a war hanging over their heads, he supposes the question of death is always relevant.

"Young, I s'pose," Sirius remarks eventually. James' breath hitches at the thought, and he can feel Marlene shifting beside him to survey Sirius critically.

"I don't know about that, but you'll definitely go fighting," she says thoughtfully, and Emmeline makes a noise of agreement.

"Oh, yeah? What about you, McKinnon?" Sirius retorts sharply.

"On her feet," Emmeline answers quietly. James glances at her, takes in her sad eyes and the conviction in her voice, and feels a rush of something painful when he acknowledges the truth of her words. Emmeline glances at Sirius. "Marls wouldn't deign to die in any way other than on her feet," she says, her tone not quite rueful, but something more jagged, more brutal.

James, on the other hand, doesn't want to think about it. He can't think about it, because if he does, then he has to imagine Sirius— _best friend brother soulmate_ —fighting to the death, maybe young, maybe not, and he has to imagine Marlene— _oldest friend sister always has his back_ —dying, and then he has to imagine Emmeline in tears— _second oldest friend part of their childhood trio ten years old and crying into his chest when her father died_ —and then it's a series of bodies littering his mind, Remus— _Marauder kind good self-deprecating worth so much more than he believes_ —Peter— _Marauder loyal always tries hard always wants to be better always just looking to be worth something to people who don't deserve him_ —Lily—

He imagines Lily Evans' bright, lively green eyes as something cold and empty, and he suddenly feels intensely sick.

He will fight in this war because it is the right thing to do, he has no doubt about that, but he will always have his friends' backs, because he cannot fathom surviving in a world where he has to bury any one of them.

x

James is a child when he first meets Marlene, a year older when he meets Emmeline, eleven years old when he meets Sirius, Lily, Remus and Peter, and eighteen when he learns a dozen more names that mean something like _wolf pack_ when he joins the Order.

There's Benjy, a Ravenclaw muggleborn two years older than James' crew, with pink-tipped hair and a refusal to believe anything is ever locked or off-limits; there's Mundungus, his absolute best friend in the world, and a pureblooded Slytherin kleptomaniac to boot; there's Dorcas, a Ravenclaw from Benjy's year, a girl with twenty years' worth of blunt honesty running through her veins and an unquenchable loyalty to her friends; there's Fabian and Gideon, twin Gryffindors in that year, boys with wit and laughter and flamboyance as their shields against the darkness, each in love with one of Benjy's best friends and too filled with life to try and hide it; there's Caradoc, a Ravenclaw in James' own year, whose passions include elf rights, bantering with Marlene and being completely enamoured with Emmeline; there's Edgar, a boy who would be an ornithologist if he wasn't a rebel fighter, a boy who has only ever wanted to save the world for kids like his best friend, Ted, and immediately warms to Sirius because of his affinity for runaway Blacks.

They're just kids, really, the ones James spends most his time with, but they are kids who believe in a better world, and who are willing to lay their lives down for it, and James thinks there is something so much more worthy in the meaning of their lives than there is in the lives they were always taught to want most; safe lives, yes, but guilty ones, fraught with the knowledge that they would be participating in an inherently morally repugnant system.

Some days, James is scared, so scared, about all of these kids he's let into his heart, but some days he feels on top of the world, because they all believe in something with such utter conviction, it just makes him want to scream at the world _THROW YOUR BEST AT US. WE CAN TAKE IT. JUST WATCH._

x

"Come on," Marlene says, tugging at his hand. There is a fury in her face, something white-hot and dangerous, and it almost makes the fractures in her heart seem less damaging, the holes in her spirit less gaping, but not quite.

James is yearning to hold her tight and comfort her like he has every other time she's been hurt in the last sixteen years, but he's numb. He is nineteen now, and it seemed so old just yesterday, but today—today, when faced with the truth of life; that is, it ends in death—it seems impossibly young.

Surely they are too young to have their hearts broken so completely? The only face in James' mind is Edgar's and all of a sudden, he is overwhelmed by the feeling that he will never be able to breathe properly again.

James' mind slowly registers that they are in Sirius' room at HQ, and he looks at Marlene in confusion. She pays him no attention and looks at Sirius.

"I want to commemorate them," she says, and if her voice shakes a little, James will not hold it against her.

Sirius' eyes are a mix of sorrow and fire and thirst for vengeance, but he simply nods. "How?"

Marlene's mouth twists into something that might be a smile if it wasn't so devastated. "Like the Greeks of old," she says quietly. "Let's put them in the stars."

James sits beside Marlene as she pulls her shirt off and grasps her hand as Sirius fishes out a tattooing kit. He carefully swabs her back and quickly sketches something. Marlene glances at it, and, at her nod, Sirius picks up the needle and presses it to her skin.

James grips onto Marlene, to give her a pressure to focus on other than the pricks in her back, but he thinks it's as much for him as it is for her—Marlene is his oldest friend, and she has always been something of an anchor for him. Even with the slight pain of her clenching his bones, it's good—it keeps him grounded, reminds him that he is real, and that something exists outside of this numb grief.

When Sirius is done, James surveys Marlene's back. Right beneath her left shoulder blade is a night sky, with some stars stitched together into a constellation.

"Cygnus," Sirius says by way of explanation, reading James' mind like always. "So he could be with his birds forever, I guess." His mouth twists into something sad and angry but still pretending to be a smile. "That's his wife and that's their little girl," he says, pointing at two satellite stars beside the swan constellation.

"Even if the world forgets them," Marlene says, something unsteady yet unflinching in her voice, "I won't. They're with me forever—together, too. I don't know what's going to happen to me, but I will carry them around with me forever, and they'll never be separated again."

James is suddenly filled with a mad rush of love for these two friends of his, these two kids who have always had his back and never let him go alone, because they've obviously discussed this before or at least known the way the other feels about this, and it means James isn't alone. He's never really thought that he was the only one with the fears in his heart, but it's one thing not to think you're alone and something else entirely to feel as if you are not.

He presses his fingers to the constellation and stars on Marlene's back and breathes in deeply.

"Do not go gentle," he says quietly, closing his eyes and thinking of Edgar in his prime, a montage of the man, the boy, the kid who died too young with so much love in his heart—his head thrown back, laughing with Ted; arms linked with Andromeda in Ted's wedding photos; with his own wife, holding his daughter and pressing a kiss to her forehead, like a promise, like _we will make this world better for you_ ; a seventeen year old boy in a Hufflepuff tie and the entire world at his fingertips—

James closes his eyes and remembers.

x

"You're fucking joking, right?" Dorcas demands, squaring her shoulders as she fixes Benjy with a glare.

Benjy is resolute. "No way, Meadowes," he says stubbornly.

"Benjy, I have had your back in _every fight_ ," she cries out. "What the fuck is the difference now?"

"The difference is that _he's in love with you!_ " Benjy yells, flinging an arm to point through the glass at Fabian, lying in the infirmary. "He needs you to be there when he wakes up—hell, _you_ need you to be when he wakes up."

Dorcas looks at him angrily, her eyes filled with unshed tears—she knows he's right, James thinks, but she wouldn't be Dorcas if she ever gave in.

Benjy sighs. "Look, you and Mundungus are the two most important people in the world to me," he says quietly, and James suddenly feels like he's intruding. "And you are each in love with one of those two boys in there." He inclines his head towards the infirmary, where Mundungus is sitting vigil at Gideon's bedside, not even bothering with his usual nonchalant façade. "I'm not taking either of you guys away from them—they need you, Dor."

"I fucking hate you," Dorcas says finally, but she's half-crying and her voice is cracking and it's overwhelmingly obvious to James that she means the absolute opposite.

Benjy smiles briefly. "Love you too," he says softly, slinging an arm around her and pulling her in for a close hug, before releasing her and tapping on the glass. He makes some complicated hand gesture at Mundungus, who looks up to nod at him and return it.

Half-smile on his face, Benjy turns to the amassed group for the mission—James, Marlene, Sirius, Caradoc, Mad-Eye and Aberforth—and cocks his eyebrow.

"Dibs on Dolohov," he says casually.

x

James is tearing into the walls, absolute ripping them apart in his terrified, wild, erratic fury, because he needs to _feel_ something, even if it's his fingers smashing into wood or blood streaming from a fist he crashes into the stone.

With so many of his friends dead, he needs something to remind him he's still alive. Even more than that, he thinks, he needs a reason to believe it's still worth living.

This is his own crisis of faith, not brought about by an abandonment by God, but by the loss of so many people he let into his heart—his friends are the only people with the power to break his heart, and he feels like it's shattered into as many pieces as Benjy was.

 _Benjy_. His name tastes bitter in James' mouth, because now all he can think of is Benjy, with his pink hair and utmost loyalty to his friends; Benjy, who taught all the purebloods about soccer; Benjy, the kid who would jump in front of a curse for any of them, and did, in the end; Benjy, blown to bits. They only ever found pieces of him, and there's bile rising in James' throat, because _fuck_ , he deserved better. They all did.

And sometimes James wishes desperately that he was better—not to be the best or anything, but just to be good enough to save them for once.

A dry sob cracks out of James' chest, and suddenly he's curled up on the floor, hugging himself tightly, as if that way he can keep all the people in his heart close to his chest, safe from a world that lets them die for giving a damn.

He used to think of them as heroes, but he's started to realise something about war: even when you win, you lose.

x

Lily is _pregnant_ , and James is an overwhelming jumble of terror and guilt and unquenchable ecstasy.

Ecstasy because he and Lily are going to have a _baby_ ; they have somehow managed to make a little person, and he is so impossibly in love with his wife and this tiny little person that he hasn't even met yet. There's terror, though, and guilt, because they are fighting in a war and the world is a far more heartbreaking place than James ever realised before he was eighteen, and how can he bring a _child_ into this?

Somehow, though, the warring reactions consolidate themselves into determination—he _will_ make the world better for his child and all his friends; he will honour what his friends died fighting for by renewing his conviction to succeed; and he will make sure that the world is the kind of place Edgar would have wanted for his little girl, the kind of place she deserved a chance to live in.

He will do it, or he'll die trying.

x

Marlene's back is a myriad of stars now, and every time James is overwhelmed by the beauty of it, he's also struck by the heartbreak of it all.

She's in the infirmary, shivering. She's only in her underwear, but James doesn't think it's the temperature that's making her shake.

Her mission didn't go well. There was some form of altercation with Travers and Avery, and they threatened her family—James has always thought of Marlene as fearless, but there is something terrified in her eyes, and his heart clenches. Marlene's family is almost as dear to him as his own was, given that he and Marlene basically grew up in each other's pockets, and the thought of anyone hurting them fills him with the kind of rage he is not quite sure how to control.

Lily, Emmeline and the Marauders, sans Sirius, rush in but they stop suddenly at the sight of Marlene—shivering, with welts all across her body that scream _Travers_ and a bloodied, bruised fist that also screams Travers, but something far more satisfactory. James hopes the bastard's nose hurt like hell.

Lily, holding Harry, is the first to step forward, and she gently hands Harry to Marlene. Marlene looks up at her in confusion, but accepts the boy out of habit, holding him close to her chest. James notices the careful way she manoeuvres him so that he isn't touching any of her welts, and it doesn't strike him as an action to avoid any pain for herself, but perhaps to avoid marring his son with any contact with what a Death Eater left behind. His heart swells with love for her.

Slowly, she stops shivering. Emmeline and Lily sit on either side of her, and Remus sits cross-legged on the bed next to hers. Peter stands behind Remus, the look on his face fraught with something James doesn't know how to identify, but twists his heart for his friend regardless.

Sirius and Dorcas appear in the doorway, and Dorcas heads over to Marlene's bed to sit on the other side of Emmeline. Sirius comes over to where James is leaning against the wall near Marlene, staring at her back as she unsteadily recounts what happened.

"Travers?" Sirius whispers hoarsely, staring at the welts marring Marlene's skin.

James nods, transfixed by something that he cannot place—with a start, he realises that none of her stars have been struck through, that despite the welts all over Marlene, their friends are still safe in their stars.

It feels, absurdly, like a victory.

x

The two worst tattoos to commit to Marlene's back, in James' memory, were the twins. Dorcas and Mundungus had insisted on being there, and the sight of them each pressing a kiss to their fingers and then touching the twins' stars is not one James thinks he will ever forget.

However, any grief that James has ever felt over any of their deaths, vast and overwhelming as it was each time, is nothing compared to now.

He is distantly aware of Emmeline—clever, capable Emmeline, with her quick wit and brisk, unflappable demeanour—throwing things around the room, breaking glass and smashing porcelain, as if she can possibly make the world around her look even a fraction as broken as her heart feels now that her best friend is gone.

James flinches, because there is nothing in him that has ever been prepared for trying to take on the world without Marlene McKinnon, and it seems like he has to learn how.

He almost feels numb, but it's more like the grief and pain is so all-consuming that he has no room for any other feeling. He wants to scream and cry and raze down the walls of every Death Eater who has ever lived. He wants to rip Travers apart, and James is not a naturally violent person, but he has never been gripped by something so vicious and ugly before, something so jagged and painful. He feels like his heart is being dragged over barbed wire, and he has no idea how to save the world without Marlene at his back.

He remembers her at Hogwarts, racing him around the pitch with a gleeful laugh, the fondness in her voice every time she called him Cap, the way her eyes danced whenever she bickered with Sirius, her fierce conviction and fearlessness, the way she had his back every day since they met, and he throws up.

Nobody will ever immortalise Marlene McKinnon on their back, he thinks to himself, and it makes him want to cry.

x

The world immortalises him in a statue, but he'd rather be in the stars.

* * *

 **a/n.** if you've read this far, reviews are really appreciated! please don't favourite without reviewing :)


End file.
